Posted on 10/30/2001 6:38:11 AM PST by freedomnews
Damaged by diversity
© 2001 Linda Bowles
Our national borders are the front lines of America's war against terrorism. It should come as no surprise to anyone that our borders are being overrun. They are open doors to the easy entry – legal and illegal – of those who would do us harm.
The facts are beyond refutation. At this moment, there are more than 31 million people living in the United States who were born in a foreign country. This is an increase of 11.3 million, or 57 percent, since 1990.
At this moment, between nine million and 10 million immigrants are illegally living in the United States. The illegal population in America has increased by an average of 500,000 per year for the last 10 years. None of them were checked for criminal records, diseases, ability to support themselves or connections with terrorist groups.
Surely it must be clear, even to those who consider it an act of bigotry to restrict any kind of immigration, that if a poor Mexican laborer can successfully sneak into the country, so can terrorists whose primary purpose is to kill as many Americans as possible.
Some of those illegally in America came on student visas and never showed up for school. Others came on temporary visas of one sort or another, and stayed after their visas expired. We don't know where they are or what they are doing. There is no tracking system. There is no follow up.
In granting visas, we investigate backgrounds sloppily or not at all. We make no special effort to check out or bar entry to students or visitors from Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba and North Korea – all of whom are on the State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorist groups. They have no trouble entering our country.
Steven A. Camarota is director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies. In testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said, "The current terrorist threat to the United States comes almost exclusively from individuals who arrive from abroad ... America's borders are a major theater of operations. ... the weapons of our enemies are not aircraft carriers or even commercial airliners, but rather the terrorists themselves."
Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for Immigration Reform, had this to say in a recent essay: "As we look around the United States, with the proliferation of ethnic communities where people remain culturally and ethnically separated from the American mainstream, it is apparent that the threads that hold this large and diverse country together are being threatened."
Two-thirds of the population growth in the United States since 1990 can be attributed to mass, unskilled immigration. For decades, immigration policies have been tilted toward Third World countries. Over 70 percent of the immigrants arriving in America during the 1990s came from Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean and East Asia.
It is projected, to the delight of many, that by 2050, there will be no majority race in America. In effect, the government of the United States is redefining America through its immigration policies. It is doing so without once asking the American people what kind of a country they want America to be, in terms of culture, language, tradition or even allegiance. In the minds of the ruling elite, diversity trumps unity as "our greatest strength."
Despite all the slogans, diversity can be a fatal weakness. Without unifying values and commitments, history informs us that ethnic diversity and multi-culturalism often generate suspicion and hatred, fragmenting a country into hostile factions, tearing it apart at its ethnic and cultural seams.
The truth we need to face is this: America is suffering an immigration glut. Parts of America are like Third World countries. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have no interest in learning the language or adopting the culture of their new country. They have formed separate communities that function as avant-garde outposts of their countries of origin. They offer a ready-made home base for terrorists.
For decades, liberal elitists and globalists have effectively squelched debate by labeling as "racist" or "uncaring" anyone who wished to talk honestly and realistically about the problem of immigration. For decades, the Democrat Party has nixed any attempt to stem the flow of Third World immigrants into America's slums and ghettos, knowing they would all vote the straight Democrat ticket. For decades, various businesses have welcomed and exploited cheap immigrant labor.
We need a totally new immigration policy, one which reflects the philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt: "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
By Jody A. Benjamin
Staff WriterP> October 29, 2001
Here's one to add to the growing list of revelations about immigration since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: an overtaxed, underfunded immigration investigations unit.
While the Immigration and Naturalization Service increased deportations of foreign-born criminals in recent years, it says it has been unable to deport 300,000 others it says should go -- 250,000 among them have vanished into American society.
And INS resources to track down this missing population -- who run the gamut from students who overstayed their visas to green card holders with felony records -- have not kept pace with the skyrocketing growth of undocumented immigrants living in the country, now about 8 million people nationwide.
Groups favoring tighter controls on immigration see INS' inability to find those it has ordered deported as a gaping loophole that must be slammed shut if the country is to regain control of its borders or to fight terrorism effectively.
Others say that while it is clear INS needs more resources to do its job, increased spending to track down visa overstays and ineligible asylum-seekers is not likely to cough up terrorists. Rather than cast a general dragnet, they argue a smarter approach would be to improve intelligence about specific threats.
"It's like suggesting that we can reduce the murder rate by jailing everyone who commits a traffic violation," said Ben Johnson of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, D.C. "We have to keep our eye on the ball here."
None of the 19 suspected hijackers from the Sept. 11 attack had been ordered deported by an immigration judge, according to the INS. But the agency thinks as many as six might have entered the country illegally and, had they been encountered by INS, could have been deported.
The bulk of the vanished population consists of those who overstayed a business, tourist or student visa and those who entered illegally by land or sea, said INS spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar.
"We cannot find them. That's why we can't remove them," Kraushaar said. "We're trying to track a population that is fundamentally trying to evade us."
Of the remaining 50,000 whom the INS has been unable to deport, about 20,000 are state prisoners that the INS plans to deport once their sentences have been served. Another 30,000 are in INS custody -- including illegal workers picked up during INS raids and asylum-seekers whose cases have been denied.
INS may be having trouble finding this population because the agency typically uses the mail to notify applicants they should leave, said Steven Camarota, a researcher with the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
"We call them run letters," Camarota said. "Rather than call people in to tell them of their decision, INS gives them advance notice."
Advocates counter that many on the INS's missing list have no idea they have been ordered deported. Because the process can stretch out over months or even years, many applicants change addresses before hearing back from INS. Many have strong cases for appealing their deportation orders and are ultimately allowed to stay, advocates say.
"Everything we know about these terrorists [from Sept. 11] shows that they were not immigrants," Johnson said. "They were visitors intent on wrongdoing. What we're seeing now is opportunism by people who want to shut immigration down."
Either way, resources to track down this population are scarce, according to INS statistics.
There are 2, 000 investigators nationwide charged with tracking down foreigners who have been ordered deported -- about one agent for every 150 cases.
And with INS putting higher priorities on chasing alien smugglers and drug felons, the bulk of cases where people can't be found have not gotten a lot of attention.
Since Sept. 11, about half of all INS investigators have been assigned to track the terrorists.
"I didn't even know where Oklahoma was," a German surveillance specialist named Mike admitted sheepishly as the NATO AWACS surveillance plane cruised toward the East Coast from its temporary post at Oklahoma's Tinker Air Force Base.
There's so much news breaking, these days, it's hard to keep up.
It's overwhelming. There's just no precedent for it in my 25 years in the news business.
One of the recent stories that didn't have "legs" because of information overload was one broken by the New York Times Oct. 4. (Too bad that paper's registration doesn't permit direct hotlinks to important stories like this.)
"Security for domestic shipments of surface-to-air missiles, cruise missiles and other explosives has been so poor that terrorists could easily obtain them for use in an attack in this country, according to a classified government report and other confidential records," the story said.
Wow!
The article went on to explain that the General Accounting Office had found stunning lapses in the system for shipping military explosives around the United States by truck. The GAO characterized those lapses as posing "substantial national security or public safety risks."
The report was issued in July, but, since Sept. 11, takes on new significance.
Listen to some of the details and conclusions:
Terrorists could obtain weapons of the U.S. military that are moved and temporarily stored in private trucks with little difficulty.
The U.S. military, unlike Federal Express, often cannot even identify where weapons and explosives are when they are being shipped.
Investigators found that a shipment of 192 Stinger missiles was left in a civilian storage area without the knowledge of the military or the contractor who shipped them.
Trucking companies transporting weapons are allowed to leave trucks in commercial-carrier terminals with few safeguards from intruders.
Investigators were able to access missiles and rockets in storage terminals by simply flashing phony Defense Department credentials.
Investigators who deliberately tried to raise suspicions were not challenged.
Gates protecting dangerous materials were left unlocked.
None of the facilities had alarms to detect intrusions.
A site responsible for storing Hawk surface-to-air missiles left open its garage door.
Five sites containing a full military arsenal – including cruise missiles, SAMs, anti-tank rockets, 72 bombs, 14,000 rounds for howitzers and other explosives and munitions – were accessible. Such irresponsibility on the part of government would lead me to believe it's not a question of whether terrorists have obtained such deadly firepower … it's a question of how much.
It also puts the lie to the assertion that only more federal government authority and regulation can make us safe.
These people are the problem.
They are inept at best, co-conspirators with the terrorists at worst.
Just so I'm not accused of using 20-20 hindsight to make my case, let me remind you about the 14 Syrian pilots who were permitted to attend flight schools in Texas recently. This story was broken by WorldNetDaily's Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry and widely disseminated (with little credit, I might add) after Sept. 11. This incredible oversight took place amid the new awareness of the terrorist threat.
I submit to you only the federal government could be that dumb or that corrupt or that complacent about national security threats of this magnitude.
But, to make matters worse, to my knowledge these Syrians have still not been given the boot.
Neither has the federal government done a thing yet to secure its borders.
Neither has the federal government done anything to clean up corruption in the Customs Department that permits trainloads of material to enter the United States without inspection.
And I'll bet you a dollar to a donut America's military weaponry is still not under proper guard when it is in transit.
On and on it goes.
Do you think the answer is more centralized authority and more federal bureaucracy? I don't. I think that's the problem.
But what's the solution?
The American people need to become more self-reliant. They need to hold their government accountable. They need to take matters into their own hands. They need to arm themselves and be prepared to defend themselves. They need to stop looking to Washington for help and start asserting their proper authority in local governments. They need to realize the federal government is a great albatross around their necks – even, unfortunately, in times of crisis.
Can you please provide a link to, or citation for this quote?
The Democrats had to get Clinton the votes somehow. What's a few 6,000 deaths for "the good of the Socialist whole?"
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